Dodgers Gil Hodges (61 percent), Maury Wills (40.2) and Don Newcombe (20.7) were among the top seven vote-getters in the Hall of Fame Veterans Committee balloting announced Tuesday — but none of the candidates got the 75 percent needed for enshrinement (see mlb.com coverage and the full results by clicking here).

Among non-players, the late Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley (44.4) and former Dodgers and Angels general manager Buzzie Bavasi (37.0) were among the top four — but here, too, nobody hit the magic number.

Since their eligibility for the writers’ ballot expired long ago, Wills, Newcombe and fans of the late Hodges have anticipated this day each year with the hope the Dodgers greats will be honored.

Ill take the 15-1 odds in Las Vegas on Jim Furyk to win L.A.s pro golf tournament, which began this morning and runs through Sunday at Riviera Country Club in Pacific Palisades.

Furyk is No. 2 in the official world rankings, and Whatsisname isnt here.

More important, Furyk has three qualities that most recent Nissan Open winners have shared: hes experienced (rather than a young phenom), hes accurate off the tee (instead of a long driver), and hes in good form (not just a big name).Continue reading “Who will win the Nissan Open?” »

A lot of e-mailers thought I was unfair to Tony Dungy in my column Tuesday on the Super Bowl-winning coach’s comments about his Christian faith. So, in the interest of balance, I’ll give equal time to those e-mailers. Here are highlights of today’s batch of correspondence.

I guess I missed it. All of us covering the Lakers-Spurs game on Sunday missed it.

Here’s the entire line from my play-by-play notes about the incident that led to Kobe Bryant’s suspension by the NBA for one game without pay, Tuesday night’s game at New York, costing the guard six figures in salary:

Please explain why Hillary Clinton, in announcing, “I’m in,” found it useful to add, “And I’m in to win.”

Writing sports, I’m always around people who are in to win. I notice that unless they’re underdogs desperate to be taken seriously, they never need to point it out. So why does a politician with far more than an Orange Bowl at stake, one favored in the polls to win her party’s nomination, punctuate her presidential candidacy kickoff by stating the obvious?Continue reading “Hillary on the object of the game” »

News of Art Buchwald’s death at 81 sent me to the bookcase to find a slim yellowed paperback called “I Am Not a Crook,” a collection of the great political satirist’s columns from the Watergate years. Buchwald’s imagination allowed him to write about heavy topics in terms everyone could enjoy. Since this is supposed to be a sports blog, let’s enjoy the time Buchwald goofed on President Nixon’s choice of a replacement for disgraced Vice President Agnew by turning the whole episode into a football game.

In the 21st Century sign that baseball season is just around the corner, the first fantasy-league magazines of the year have hit the newstands, full of ratings and predictions for about 700 major-leaguers.

My baseball fantasy is that actual ballclubs still matter more than any of my friends’ fantasy teams. Thus I used one of the magazines to figure out how, say, the Dodgers could expect to do in 2007 if they were an entry in a Rotisserie league.

If you heard the callers on sports-talk radio Thursday, you might have the impression that 99 percent of Los Angeles not only doesn’t care about David Beckham joining the Galaxy but is downright hostile to the English star.

Good stuff in Adam Gopnik’s article on watching pro football (“The Unbeautiful Game”) in the Jan. 8 edition of The New Yorker, touching on the efforts of the sport’s statisticians to deliver unconventional insights like those of baseball’s sabermetricians.

The point, Gopnik writes, is “to challenge the conventional wisdom about how teams win and lose, and the football analysts are doing that now. Their conviction (much simplified) is that in the NFL you pass to win and run to sustain a victory … and that most of the more conservative, hardnosed football strategies, like the one-run, bunt-and-sacrifice strategies in baseball, look canny and play dumb. There is even a strong, heretical movement under way against automatically punting on fourth down.”